Upcoming Bay Area events

/ Events

A few events around the SF Bay Area that I found interesting:

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Vote Counting

/ Philosophy

I’ve been having an email discussion about the electoral college and whether it makes your vote “count for less” in non-swing states. I think there’s a fallacy in the whole “my vote doesn’t count” argument — it’s like saying “Nadar voters lost the election for Gore” and ignoring the possibility that the millions of people who voted for Bush might have played some small part as well.

To see where you stand on this issue, try this thought experiment:

It’s the day before the election, and 100 people are going to vote in a city council race between Smith and Jones. How much will my vote count?

  • A) 1/100th of the deciding power.
  • B) Not knowable until the outcome of the election is known.
  • C) Depends on whether Diebold machines are used.

It’s the day before the same election, and a fortune teller tells me Smith will win. How much will my vote count if I vote for Smith? If I vote for Jones?

  • A) 1/100th of the deciding power.
  • B) Depends on whether the fortune teller can also tell me where I lost my car keys.
  • C) Depends on whether the fortune teller works for Diebold.

It’s the day after the same election, and 55 people voted for Smith and 45 for Jones. If I voted for Smith, how much did my vote count? If I voted for Jones?

  • A) 1/100th of the deciding power regardless of your vote.
  • B) Any of the following:
    • B-1) 0% if I voted for Jones, 1/55th if I voted for Smith.
    • B-2) 0% unless I were the 51st person to vote for Smith on election day.
    • B-3) 0% unless my vote was the 51st one to be counted for Smith after the polls close.
  • C) Depends on whether Smith knows someone who works for Diebold.

Score:

If you answered mostly A, you’re an empowered, well-balanced citizen who believes in free will.

If you answered mostly B, in your heart you believe in determinism. Stories about time travel and drug-induced insanity upset you, but you’ll attribute it to an over-active basil ganglia.

If you answered mostly C, you’re a well-balanced citizen who believes in free will but realizes that his vote not only doesn’t count, but isn’t even counted.

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The next question?

/ Media Technology

I was on a panel on wearable computing a couple days ago, and an interesting question came up:

Ten years ago, when you picked up the phone you asked Who is it?

Today, with cell phones and Caller ID, you pick up the phone and ask Where are you?

What question will be asked ten years from now?

My guess is that even when you meet someone face-to-face you’ll ask Who are you with?, with the assumption that your friend might have invisible cyberspace tagalongs with her and that it might not be polite to butt in on the middle of their conversation.

Other condenders?

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Alice Cooper: Rock is no place for a street fighting man

/ Politics

Alice Cooper is ranting about how Kerry-supporting rock stars mix their rock-and-roll with politics:

“To me, that’s treason,” Cooper told the Canadian Press. “I call it treason against rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics.”

“When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I’d run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick.”

I can only assume when he played the Stones he didn’t listen to the lyrics…

(props to The Volokh Conspiracy for the link)

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Number of the Bass

/ Uncategorized

(via engadget): DoCoMo Sentsu (a subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo) and the Fishing Boat and System Engineering Association of Japan are about to test a new system where fish are tagged with a 2D barcode that customers can scan with their cellphones and get everything they’d ever want to know about their dinner, including the fisherman’s name and where and when the fish was caught.

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Good explanation for Apple v. Real

/ Intellectual Property

My friend Rawhide just pointed me to an answer to my head-scratchings about Apple v. Real and how it fits with their give-away-the-blades and sell-the-razors strategy. From EFF’s Deeplinks:

So you’re Apple, and you make all your money selling iPods. You invest in the Music Store to make the iPod even more attractive, never intending to make much margin on the 99 cent downloads. But here’s the problem &mdash you really don’t want every other maker of portable digital music players to free-ride on your Music Store investment. After all, the Music Store is supposed to make the iPod more attractive than the competition.

Here’s where FairPlay comes in. It’s a great barrier to entry that keeps the iPod as the exclusive device for the Music Store. Competitors who dare to reverse engineer the protocols or otherwise support interoperability find themselves staring down the barrel of the DMCA.

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Time to change the locks?

/ Media Technology

Ed Felton has been blogging on the partial “cracks” (collisions) found in the MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions that are being reported at Crypto 2004.

Felton’s brief analysis:

Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will be.

Note to self: design my systems so it’s possible to update crypto algorithms in all my legacy data, should the need arise.

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NPUC 2004 trip report

/ Media Technology

Every year Dan Russell at IBM Almaden hosts a small one-day workshop for HCI and related researchers to schmooze and talk a particular subject. This year’s topic was near & dear to my heart: what do we do with WAAAY too much information? The first half of the day featured talks from what Dan jokingly described as “people making the problem worse,” the second half dealt with specific methods for trying to understand huge amounts of information.

My trip report is now online for anyone who’s interested. Dan also promised that the conference video will be posted online — I’ll post a link when it’s up.

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From the nice-to-know-they-do-something-for-their-pay port…

/ Big Brother

Given the post-wardrobe-malfunction furor over at the FCC, it’s nice to see things fall on the side of free speech every now and then:

The November 20, 2001 episode involves a scene depicting Buffy kissing and straddling Spike shortly after fighting with him. Based upon our review of the scene, we did not find that it is sufficiently graphic or explicit to be deemed indecent. Given the non-explicit nature of the scene, we cannot conclude that it was calculated to pander to, titillate or shock the audience. Consequently, we conclude that the material is not patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.

(Props to Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list for the link.)

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